Re: J'accuse!: Whitehouse and NSA vs. Panix and VTW

[jfricker@vertexgroup.com (John F. Fricker)]

At 11:33 AM 9/13/96 -0700, stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>
>At least one of the newspaper articles I've read has referred to the need
>for real authentication on the net to prevent the anonymity that makes
>this kind of attack possible, and in particular for the major network providers
>to make sure that they don't export messages with bogus addressing,
>a cure that the article said would take several months to deploy.
>I don't know if they were referring to IPv6, or sendmail modifications,
>or router hacks, or what; the article's author seemed to think this was
>about bogusly-addressed email messages rather than understanding SYNs.
>

Well IPSec provides for authentication of endpoints which would identify the
syn attacker.

What amazes me is that routers happily pass packets with foreign IP return
addresses. I guess there is some valid utility to being able to originate a
connection that actually goes somewhere else for intiating a many to many
protocol. But I can't think of any practical application that would
necessarily be that way.

So why do routers let packets leave local networks that do not appear to
originate from said local network? Doesn't routing work "both ways" so to speak?